Wickr was founded on a strong belief that privacy is a universal human right that fuels global innovation and economic growth, and empowers democracy.

Cookies Policy

Last modified: May 17, 2018

Why We Use Cookies

As a privacy-focused company, Wickr has built and operated its platform as a ‘zero-knowledge’ system to ensure that our users have full control and ownership of their communications. This means that Wickr as a company is built private-by-design from its very start to provide secure its communications service, and does not collect or monetize your content.

Your trust is important to us and we tirelessly work on improving our services and raising awareness about our products, which are designed to ensure our users’ security and privacy. To accomplish these goals, we use cookies that enable us to learn how our website visitors navigate our content and how web users interact with our marketing materials so we can understand how to improve our website and our content so we can continue building privacy and collaboration-enhancing features accessible to all users. We may also use cookies to recommend content that might interest you based on your past interactions with us. We make every reasonable effort to: a) minimize the information we collect to operate the service, b) limit the amount of time we keep it and c) enable our users to proactively minimize the data they store on their devices to ensure its privacy and security.

What Are Cookies?

A cookie is a small text file, unique to your device or browser, that helps us learn about things like when users arrive at our site, how they use the site, when they leave, and when they come back. We use session-based, persistent cookies and pixel-tags. Session-based cookies last only while your browser is open and are automatically deleted when you close your browser. Persistent cookies last until you or your browser delete them or until they expire. Pixel tags, which are small blocks of code installed in or on a webpage, also provide us with insight about our users’ preferences. It’s important to note that no information about web traffic associated with our marketing and web optimization efforts can be traced back to the actual end users of Wickr products.

What Types of Cookies We Use

In addition to our own cookies, we use third-party cookies through partners like Google Analytics to understand website performance and customer interest in our product, as well as optimize the on-boarding experience for new network administrators (on Wickr Pro only). These cookies do not allow us to know your personal information, only how you interact with our website and marketing materials published on the web. We provide the utmost transparency on and up-to-date overview of cookies used on our website including the ability for website visitors to check, withdraw or modify consent for non-necessary cookies at any time.

Deleting Cookies

In addition to modifying cookies by visiting our website, you can also control and delete cookies from your browser. Here is how to do so on different browsers:

Privacy Policy

Last Modified: June 19, 2018

Thank you for using Wickr Me! Wickr allows you to encrypt and send audio, video, voice, text messages and files, and conduct voice calls, so that you can communicate safely, securely, anonymously — and easily. This document, our Privacy Policy, governs how Wickr (“we”, “us”, “Wickr”) handles our users’ (“you,” “your,” etc.) data both in the Wickr Me app itself (the “Wickr Me App” or “Wickr Me”) and on our website/servers (collectively, the “Services”). This policy does not cover Wickr business products.

Our Privacy Policy is incorporated into and is subject to the Wickr Terms of Service, so please read both documents carefully. Your use of the Services indicates your consent to this Privacy Policy and our Terms of Service. If you do not want to be bound by these agreements, you may not use our Services.

We work very hard to preserve your privacy and security, and we do our best to be as transparent as possible in explaining how we use your data in providing our Services. Not only is Wickr’s security architecture and proprietary encryption methodology designed to ensure that only users can gain access to their message content, we promise to never monetize your communications or personal information. Ever. Please contact us if you have any questions at privacy@wickr.com

Wickr Messenger (Wickr Me App)

Our Privacy Practices in Brief: Wickr has to collect some information from you in order to provide our Services to you, but we do so in a highly limited, highly secure way.

We can’t see information you send through the Wickr Me App. Your information is always disguised with multiple rounds of salted, cryptographic hashing before it is transmitted to our servers. Because of this we don’t know — and can’t reveal to others — anything about you or how you use the Wickr Me App aside from the limited information such as the date your account was created, the date of last use and the type of device on which such account was installed. Please see our Legal Process Guidelines for more details.

Wickr does not log or store metadata associated with your use of the Wickr Me App.

When you send end-to-end encrypted ephemeral files using Wickr Me, it is important to note that if you do not trust the person you’re talking to, do not open files coming from them or send them photos/files you do not want to be saved.

You control how long your messages are accessible to the recipients, through expiration, burn-on-read settings, and the recall feature which allows you to retract a message you sent. However, there is no magic pill for betrayal and we cannot prevent someone using a camera to take a picture of a message on a screen. Therefore, we strongly encourage you to only send private messages or sensitive information to people you know and trust.

When you block someone from being able to contact you on Wickr Me, they are automatically added to the block list in your settings. To protect your privacy, they won’t know that you are blocking them when they send you a message.

If you enabled message notifications for Wickr Me, you will receive notifications about incoming messages on your device’s home screen which will contain the sender’s name as you set it in your Wickr contacts. You can also enable message preview in Wickr settings for notifications, which will add the content of a message to the home screen notifications. Please note, if you don’t want other to see who is messaging you on Wickr Me, you can disable notifications in your device settings in which case you will continue to receive messages, but notifications will not appear on your home screen.

You own your data. We do not share or sell any data about our users. Period.

What Information Does Wickr Collect and How Is It Used? We are committed to limiting our collection of your information to what is necessary to provide you with our Services in accordance with applicable data protection and privacy laws.

The limited information we collect, receive, or have access to is used to provide the Service, to allow you to send and receive messages and files, to respond to your requests, and to improve the Service, in line with the legitimate interest we have in delivering the Services to you. It may also be shared under valid legal process and with third party service providers for the limited purposes described below.

What We Don’t Collect Equally important to us is to share what information we don’t collect. We do not collect your location information or have access to the contents of the communications you send using the Wickr Me App. Remember, however, that if you send a Wickr message to another Wickr user, that message or related content might remain on their device even after you delete it from yours, depending on the value you set for the expiration or burn-on-read time of that message and whether the recipient took a screenshot of the message.

User-Provided Information We collect some very limited information from you after you download the Wickr Me App in order to allow you to create a Wickr Me Account, and begin using the Wickr Me App.

Your Wickr ID: Your Wickr ID is how you allow others to contact you via Wickr Me. It does not have to be your real name or provide any reference to your identity. Like other information pertaining to your account, it is disguised with multiple rounds of salted, cryptographic hashing when we associate it with your Device Information (described below). The purpose of this cryptographic representation is to allow you to use our Services without our needing to know who you are.

Your Password: We require you to have a password to use the Wickr Me App, but we never store your password on our servers and don’t store it by default in any form on your device. For your own security, we recommend that you use a long, unique password consisting of a mix of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols.

Optional User-Provided Information Within the Wickr Me App, we provide a few optional features for your convenience. Some of these features, described below, will ask for personal information. If you want to keep your use of Wickr Me as anonymous as possible, please read these sections carefully in order to understand how we associate information you provide with your Wickr Me account.

Push Notifications: When setting up your Wickr Me account, we will ask if you want to receive notifications of new Wickr messages, software updates, and other administrative and technological developments. Push notifications are functions of devices operating system, so if you enable this feature, your devices operating system’s manufacturer will know that you are using the Wickr Me App, but will not know anything about how you use it or be able to see anything you transmit through it.

ID Connection: To allow your friends to find you on Wickr Me without knowing your Wickr ID, you may choose to associate your other contact information — currently, just your phone number— with your Wickr ID. When you use this feature, we disguise your contact information with multiple rounds of salted cryptographic hashing for storage on our servers. This way, you can let your friends search for you on Wickr Me without revealing your contact information to us. If you use ID Connect to associate your phone number with your Wickr ID, we use a third party service Twilio solely to deliver a confirmation SMS to you, but that party will not receive any information about you other than your phone number, and the SMS message itself will contain no information except a confirmation link.

Invitations: If you wish to invite others to use the Wickr Me App, you will be asked for permission to access your device’s contacts in order to invite them to use our Services. We never store your device contacts on our servers in any way. All invitations are generated locally on your device, without sharing any information with us.

Contact Finder: Contact Finder allows you to search for contacts who have used ID Connect to associate their phone number with their Wickr accounts. If you use Contact Finder, the Wickr Me App will send a disguised representation of your contacts’ phone numbers to our servers to ensure that our server never accesses your actual contact list. We never store your device contacts in any form on our servers.

Encrypting Cloud Data: The Wickr Me App will allow you to share files you have stored with cloud storage services Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box. The Wickr Me App will make encrypted copies of such files when sending as Wickr messages, which expire when the message self-destructs or is recalled. Cloud storage of your files on Google Drive, Dropbox and Box will be governed by these cloud storage services’ terms, conditions, and privacy policies, so please familiarize yourself with those documents before you use this feature.

Key Verification: To validate the identities of your contacts, the Wickr Me App offers a video key verification mechanism. You can send a validation request to one of your Wickr contacts when establishing connections. You will then be asked to record a short ID verification video, which will be used to validate your identity with your contacts. If the ID video verification you receive from any of your contacts does not appear authentic, you can decline to verify their identity, thus rejecting the connection. Your verification video is encrypted before it is transmitted to our servers, which renders it inaccessible to Wickr. If you decide to re-record your ID verification video, your previous video is automatically deleted from our servers. You can learn more about video key verification here.

Avatar: You can set a public profile avatar, which will become visible to others on Wickr Me so please do not add an avatar if you do not intend it to be viewed by others users.

Device Information: The Wickr App may collect hashed representations of your mobile device’s hardware ID and/or other platform-related information during registration. This information is used to tie your account to your device.

Aggregate Usage Data: During the operation of our services, we also collect aggregate, anonymous information about basic usage statistics, such as the number of messages sent by all Wickr Me users daily, what types of messages our users tend to send (e.g., voice messages more often than text), and so forth. We never attempt to (and cannot) identify users associated with any of this information.

Crash Logs: For the purpose of debugging, error correction, and system continuity, Wickr Apps transmit crash logs to a cloud-based bug reporting platform. The logs do not contain any user personal information and they pertain only to the Wickr Me App.

What Information Does Wickr Share with Third Parties? We do not share any user information we have with third parties, with the exception of the third-party service with whom we share your phone number for the sole purpose of sending you an SMS confirmation if you choose to associate your phone number with your Wickr Me ID. Please note that the provision of a phone number is completely at the user’s discretion.

We will always notify our users of any third party requests for their information unless we are legally prohibited from doing so. As soon as legally permissible, we will notify our users of requests for their information. We require a warrant before handing over the contents of communications; however, because of the nature of our technology, the contents of communications will be encrypted and undecipherable if obtained.

You Can Terminate Your Account You can terminate your account at any time. Once terminated, your account will be irrevocably suspended, ensuring that nobody can use that Wickr ID again in order to prevent impersonation. If you wish to terminate your Wickr Me account, go to Settings, “Terminate Account” and verify by entering your password.

We Retain As Little Data As Possible, for the Least Time Possible

Data Retention on Wickrʼs Servers: Our servers store the encrypted messages that you send and receive for up to 6 days to ensure their reliable delivery to each device associated with your account and the accounts to which you transmit messages. We retain certain account data (i.e., types of messages sent and account settings changes) which contain no PII for up to 6 days.

Data Retention on Your Device: All messages are stored in encrypted form on end users’ devices. You choose your own retention policy for your messages by choosing how long a message is viewable before it is deleted (via the expiration or burn-on-read time for sent messages, recall ability and manual deletion for your device). In addition, Wickr’s “secure shredder” technology uses forensic deletion techniques to help reduce the risk of deleted messages and temporary data being recovered.

We Are Serious About Security We are concerned about safeguarding the confidentiality of your information. We provide physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards to protect information we process and maintain. For example, we limit access to this information to authorized employees who need to know that information in order to operate, develop, or improve our Services. No sensitive information is in the clear: we take reasonable efforts (as described herein) to ensure that everything we store is not retrievable by us or anyone else.

However, as security experts, we know that no security system can prevent all potential security breaches. Therefore, we have limited the potential implications of such a breach by designing our system so that in the event of a breach, we would have the least possible information about you.

Children Wickr is not directed to children under the age of 13. If we learn that we have allowed a child under 13 to access our Services, we will take appropriate steps to promptly remove such account and delete all information associated with such account.

If you live in any other country except those in the European Region, you must be at least 13 years old to register for the Services. If you live in the European Region, you must be at least 16 years old to register for and use our Services.

Customer Service In an ongoing effort to improve our services and assist our customers with any questions they have about the use of the Wickr Me App, we have developed a comprehensive collection of the most commonly asked customer support questions and answers, which are available here. Any information provided to us by our users voluntarily when they request customer support (e.g., an email address, Wickr Me App version, or any other details related to user issue) will be used to respond to that individual request and may be logged as part of our effort to improve our customer service and solve any product-related issues. This user-provided information cannot be linked to our users Wickr Me accounts, unless users voluntarily include their Wickr Me account information in their customer service-related requests. We strongly discourage our users from disclosing their passwords to Wickr Me accounts to third parties.

Cookie Policy We tirelessly work on improving our services and raising awareness about our products, which are designed to ensure our users’ security and privacy. To accomplish these goals, we use cookies on the Wickr website that enable us to learn how visitors navigate our content and interact with our marketing materials so we can be more effective at informing our users about product developments.

A cookie is a small text file that is placed in visitors’ browsers to help us learn when users arrive at our site, how they use the site, when they leave, and when they come back. These cookies can never be used to identify user accounts within the Wickr App.

Here is an example of how we may use information collected via cookies: we may think that one of our new features would be very useful to the Wickr community, but cookies may tell us that very few users fully read that feature’s description on our site. That insight would help us to rethink the way we explain that product on our site or present it in an advertisement so that we can better communicate our services to our users.

We make every reasonable effort to minimize the information we collect. For example, we enforce IP masking for the website analytics purposes to conceal the last 4 digits of IP addresses which ensures that visitor’s full IP addresses are not collected via third party services such as Google Analytics.

We provide the utmost transparency on and an up-to-date overview of cookies used on our website including the ability for website visitors to check, withdraw or modify consent for non-necessary cookies at any time. More information on our Cookie Policy can be found here.

Web Forms To enable our visitors to reach out to us with sales inquiries, we may collect information using online form submissions. Please note that all information you provide via web forms on our site is strictly voluntary and will never be used in any way that is inconsistent with other provisions of this Privacy Policy.

Third Parties To improve Wickr’s products, website, or marketing, we may engage with various outside partners that have access to the limited data users voluntarily share with Wickr via web forms, cookies, or customer support and sales inquiries. We carefully select each of our partners based on Wickr’s commitment to user privacy and security. Our security team meticulously vets each prospective partner to ensure its policies and practices are on par with Wickr’s standards.

To assist Wickr with improving our web content and advertising activities, we partner with Pardot, a B2B Marketing Automation Platform, and Salesforce.

To accelerate resolution of the most frequent customer inquiries, Wickr’s support is automated in collaboration with Zendesk, a customer support platform.

To deliver a confirmation SMS to our users opting in to connect with friends via ID Connect, we use Twilio.

To manage bug reports, we use Bugsnag, a cloud-based bug reporting platform.

Each of these companies has its own policies for handling user data. Please review the respective privacy policies for Zendesk, Twilio, Pardot, WP Engine, AWS, and Bugsnag for a more complete understanding of their practices.

If you have additional questions regarding our privacy protection practices, please email us at privacy@wickr.com.

We Can Change This Privacy Policy This Privacy Policy may be updated from time to time, for any reason. We will notify you of any changes to our Privacy Policy by posting the new Privacy Policy here along with information about what has changed and an archive of past policies. You are advised to consult this Privacy Policy regularly for any changes. By continuing to use the Services, you agree to be bound by the revised Privacy Policy.

Users Outside the US If you use our Services, your information will be transferred to the U.S. and will be processed and stored under U.S. data protection and privacy regulations which may differ from those your country of residence. By using our Services and providing information to us, you consent to such transfer to and processing in the U.S. We take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this policy. Please note that all user communications on the Wickr Service are protected between devices and are never stored unencrypted hence are undecipherable to Wickr or other third parties.

You are responsible for complying with any laws or regulations in your country that govern use of applications and services like Wickr Me.

Contact Us if You Have Questions or Account-Related Requests If you have any questions regarding privacy while using our Services, or have questions about our practices, please contact us via email at privacy@wickr.com.

If you live in the European Region, please note the following:

Opt-out. You may contact us anytime to opt-out of:

direct marketing communications or

the transfer of your personal data outside the European Region. Please note that your use of some of the Service may be affected by your opt-out.

Access. You may access the data we hold about you at any time within the application or by contacting us directly.

Amend. You can also contact us to update or correct any inaccuracies in your personal data.

Erase and forget. In certain situations, for example, when the data we hold about you is no longer relevant or is incorrect, you can request that we erase your data. Please note that only you can delete your Wickr Me account at any time form within the Service, due to privacy design of the Service, we are unable to delete Wickr Me accounts upon your request.

You may contact us at gdpr@wickr.com on any questions you may have about your personal data and our use of such personal data under the GDPR.

Privacy Policy

Last Modified: June 19, 2018

Thank you for using Wickr Pro! Wickr Pro is a vetted, simple-to-use end-to-end encryption platform built by an expert security team and designed to facilitate calls and video conferences and protect the transfer of high-value sensitive communications including messages and files. Wickr (“Wickr”, “we”, or “us”) administers Wickr Pro through its messaging network and the application downloaded by the user (collectively, the “Service” or “Services”).

This document, the Wickr Pro Privacy Policy (“Privacy Policy”), governs how we handle users’ data both in the Service itself and on our servers. For more information about our data handling practices for Wickr’s consumer product, please click here. There are a few core differences in these two products, so please read their respective privacy policies carefully.

This Privacy Policy is incorporated into and is subject to the Wickr Pro Terms of Service (“Terms of Service”) and Terms of Use (“Terms of Use”), so please read these documents carefully. Your use of the Services indicates your consent to this Privacy Policy, the Terms of Service and the Terms of Use. If you do not want to be bound by these agreements, you may not use our Services.

We work very hard to preserve your privacy and security, and we do our best to be as transparent as possible in explaining how we use your data in providing our Services. Not only is Wickr’s security architecture and proprietary encryption methodology designed to ensure that only users can gain access to their message content, we promise to never monetize you or your communications. Ever. Please contact us if you have any questions at privacy@wickr.com.

Our Privacy Practices in Brief

Wickr has to collect some information about you in order to provide our Services to you, but we work to do so in a limited and secure way, as follows:

Neither Wickr nor the organization with which you are affiliated have access to secure rooms and messages you transmit by using the Service. Your messages are protected with multiple layers of encryption before they are transmitted to our servers, which is intended to make the messages only accessible to the intended recipient(s). If additional users are added to a secure room by you or by another user, then those users will be able to see the messages shared within that room as well. Please note that users can only see the messages transmitted within a secure room from the moment they joined the conversation.

Information about you such as your email address and business affiliation will be provided to us by the organization that you are affiliated with for the purposes of creating your account. This information may also be available to other users of the service. For information about how the entity or organization that you are affiliated with uses this information, please consult directly with that entity or organization.

You control how long your messages are viewable and how long secure rooms are active before they expire or are manually deleted. The upper limit of messages’ lifespans may vary depending on the Wickr service provided to you by the organization with which you are affiliated.

We do not share or sell customer data to any third party for any purposes.

Please review the rest of this Privacy Policy, below, for additional detail about the summary above.

What Information Does Wickr Collect?

We are committed to limiting our collection of your information to only what is necessary to provide you with the Services in accordance with applicable data protection and privacy laws. An administrator for the entity or organization with which you are affiliated (“Administrator”) may provide us with personally identifiable information about you, such as your e-mail address, for purposes such as sending you an e-mail with a link to download the Service. The entity or organization with which you are affiliated with may retain this information for as long as you are affiliated with that organization or entity or as long it uses the Service. We also collect information from users as described in greater detail below:

Mandatory User-Provided Information: You are required to provide limited information during the registration process to create a Wickr Pro account and to begin using the Service.

Your ID: Your Wickr Pro ID is your e-mail address. Other users of the Service within your network or in other federated networks will be able to look you up and contact you using your Wickr Pro ID.

Your Password: We require you to have a password to use the Service, but we never store your password on our servers and don’t store it in plain text on your device. You will be able to change your password at any time. In case you forget your password, you will be able to restore your access by resetting your account with a new password. You will be asked to verify either your email or phone number, depending on the settings set by the entity or organization with which you are affiliated. Please note that resetting your password will result in losing your existing conversations. For your security, we recommend that you use a long, unique password consisting of a mix of upper and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols.

Optional User-Provided Information: We provide a few optional features for your convenience, and for the convenience of the entity or organization that you are affiliated with. Some of these features permit you to provide additional personal information at your or your organization’s election.

Profile Information: The Service may allow you or your organization to set up your profile, which may include your Wickr Pro ID, name, or other information entered by your Administrator, and your avatar image, which is supplied by you. Keep in mind that your avatar is public so please do not enable if you do not intend it to be viewed by other Wickr users.

Phone Number: If two-factor authentication is enabled by the Administrator, the confirmation code will be sent to your phone number provided to us by the organization with whom you are affiliated for the purposes of verifying your identity. We use a third party service to deliver a confirmation SMS to you, but that party will not receive any information about you other than your phone number, and the SMS message itself will contain no information except a confirmation code.

Key Verification: Depending on the settings selected by the Administrator, you may be required to verify your contacts within and/or outside the network with which you are affiliated. You may use video verification to validate the identity of your contacts when establishing connections. You will be asked to record a short ID verification video, which will be used to validate your identity with your contacts. If the ID video verification you receive from any of your contacts does not appear authentic, you can decline to verify their identity, thus rejecting the connection to protect your network. Your verification video is encrypted before it is transmitted to our servers, which renders it inaccessible to Wickr and the Administrator. If you decide to re-record your ID verification video, your previous video is automatically deleted from our servers.

Push Notifications: When setting up your Wickr Pro account, we will ask if you want to receive notifications of new messages, software updates, and other administrative and technological developments. Push notifications are functions of your device’s operating system, so if you enable this feature, your device operating system’s provider will know that you are using the Service, but will not be able to see the content of the messages you transmit using the Service.

File Sharing: The Service will allow you to share files you have on your device. The Service will make encrypted copies of such files when sending them as Wickr messages, which will expire depending on the message expiration settings you select. Depending on the settings of a shared file, it may be downloaded locally on user devices.

Contacts: As you join the network with which you are affiliated, you will see all contacts within your network populate your Wickr Pro contact list. Depending on the Wickr service you use and the settings selected by the entity with which you are affiliated, you may be able to add contacts from outside your network to your Wickr Pro account. If you allow the Service to access your device’s contacts to see who among them is on Wickr Pro, the Service will send disguised representations of your contacts’ phone numbers and email addresses to our servers to ensure that our server never accesses your actual contact list. We never store your device contacts in any form on our servers.

Customer Service: Any information provided to us by a user voluntarily when they request customer support or provide feedback (e.g., an email address, the contents of their request) will be used to respond to that individual request, and may be may be logged as part of our effort to improve our customer service, solve any product-related issues or improve our Service.

Automatically-Collected Information: Wickr collects the following information automatically during your setup and use of the Service:

Device Information: The Service may collect hashed representations of your mobile device’s hardware ID and/or other platform-related information during registration. This information is used by the Service to associate your account with your device.

Aggregate Usage Data: During the operation of the Service, we also collect basic usage statistics, such as the number of messages sent by Wickr users daily, types of messages sent (e.g., voice messages more often than text), and other key performance indicators. We never attempt to, and cannot, identify users associated with any of this information.

Crash Logs: For purposes of debugging, error correction, and system continuity, Wickr Apps transmit crash logs to a cloud-based bug reporting platform. The logs do not contain any user personal information and they pertain only to the Wickr Service.

How Is Information Used and Disclosed?

The limited information that we collect, receive, or have access to is used to provide the Service, to allow you to send and receive messages and files, to respond to your requests, and to improve the Service, in line with the legitimate interest we have in delivering the Services to you. It may also be shared under valid legal process and with third party service providers for the limited purposes described below.

Legal Process

Wickr is committed to transparency and to limiting what we disclose in response to legal process. Please see our full Legal Process Guidelines, but here are the highlights:

When we receive a request for customer data related to the Service, we always attempt to redirect the third party to obtain the requested data from our customer. For valid requests that we are not able to redirect to the customer, we disclose information only when we are legally compelled to do so, and we always make sure that we provide only the data specified in the legal order. We will always notify our customers of any third party requests for their information unless we are legally prohibited from doing so. As soon as legally permissible, we will notify our users of requests for their information. We require a warrant before handing over the contents of communications; however, because of the nature of our technology, the contents of communications will be encrypted and undecipherable if obtained.

Third Party Service Providers

To improve the Service, we engage with various service providers (“Partners”) that may have access to some user information described in this Privacy Policy. Wickr takes all reasonable steps to minimize the information to which our Partners have access. We carefully select each of our Partners based on Wickr’s commitment to user privacy and security. Our security team meticulously vets each prospective partner to ensure its policies and practices are on par with Wickr’s standards.

Here are the Partners with whom we work to provide the Service:

To assist Wickr with improving our web content and advertising activities, as well as to optimize user experience during the onboarding process, we partner with Pardot, a B2B Marketing Automation Platform, and Salesforce.

To accelerate resolution of the most frequent customer inquiries, Wickr’s support is automated in collaboration with Zendesk, a customer support platform.

To maintain high-security, fast and reliable service delivery worldwide, Wickr partners with AWS, a global cloud computing service provider.

To deliver a confirmation SMS as part of Wickr’s two-factor authentication process, we use Twilio, a cloud communications service.

To deliver email invitations, we use an email server hosted by Mailgun, an email service provider.

Cookie Policy

We tirelessly work on improving our services and raising awareness about our products, which are designed to ensure our users’ security and privacy. To accomplish these goals, we use cookies on the Wickr website that enable us to learn how visitors navigate our content and interact with our marketing materials so we can be more effective at informing our users about product developments.

A cookie is a small text file that is placed in visitors’ browsers to help us learn when users arrive at our site, how they use the site, when they leave, and when they come back. These cookies can never be used to identify user accounts within the Wickr App.

Here is an example of how we may use information collected via cookies: we may think that one of our new features would be very useful to the Wickr community, but cookies may tell us that very few users fully read that feature’s description on our site. That insight would help us to rethink the way we explain that product on our site or present it in an advertisement so that we can better communicate our services to our users.

We make every reasonable effort to minimize the information we collect. For example, we enforce IP masking for the website analytics purposes to conceal the last 4 digits of IP addresses which ensures that visitor’s full IPs are not collected via Google Analytics service. We provide the utmost transparency on and up-to-date overview of cookies used on our website including the ability for website visitors to check, withdraw or modify consent for non-necessary cookies at any time.

Data Retention

Data Retention on Wickrʼs Servers Depending on which Wickr-hosted business product you are using, our servers store the encrypted messages that you send and receive for up to 30 days to ensure their reliable delivery to each device associated with your account and the accounts to which you transmit messages.

We retain certain account data (i.e., when a user account was provisioned, when a user registered, and account settings changes). User profile information is stored on our servers for as long as you use the Service, or until account deletion by an Administrator.

Data Retention by Your Entity or Organization The entity or organization with which you are affiliated with may retain information about you and your use of the Service, such as your profile information, for as long as the entity or organization desires. Please consult the entity or organization with which you are affiliated with for additional detail about its specific data retention policies.

Data Retention on Your Device All messages are stored in encrypted form on user devices. Users select a retention policy for their messages by choosing how long a message is viewable before it is deleted (via the expiration time, burn-on read time). The “expiration” time is a length of time before content is destroyed on all devices from the time it is sent (this is the maximum time-to-live). The “burn-on-read” time is a length of time before content is destroyed across all user devices once it has been read by that user (this will never extend the “expiration” time). Your content may be available to you and the recipient(s) locally, on your device(s) until it expires even after we delete it from our servers; however, you will not be able to download pre-existing content to a new device. Note that our application controls cannot destroy exported or maliciously retained messages, so you should always ensure that you are communicating with people you trust.

In addition, Wickr’s “secure shredder” technology uses forensic deletion techniques to help reduce the risk of deleted messages and temporary data being recovered.

Users for Whom the Service Is Intended

The Service is designed for communication purposes by individuals associated with an entity or organization. The Service is not designed for children under the age of 16. If we learn that we have collected personally identifiable information from a child under 16, we will take appropriate steps to promptly remove such account and delete all information associated with such account.

Users Outside the US

If you use our Services and reside outside the U.S., your information will be transferred to the U.S. and will be processed and stored there under U.S. data protection and privacy regulations which may vary from those of your country of residence. By using the Services, you agree to this transfer, storing or processing. We will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this policy.

You are responsible for complying with any laws or regulations in your country that govern use of applications and services like Wickr.

We Are Serious About Security

We are concerned about safeguarding the confidentiality of your information. We provide physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards to protect information we process and maintain. For example, within our organization, we limit access to information about you and your use of the Service to authorized employees who need to know that information in order to operate, develop, or improve the Services. As described herein, we take every reasonable step to ensure that message contents are not retrievable by us or anyone else.

However, we know that no security system can prevent all potential security breaches. Therefore, we have limited the potential implications of such a breach by designing our system so that in the event of a breach, we would have only limited information about you. Please note that all user communications on the Wickr Service are protected between devices and are never stored unencrypted hence are undecipherable to Wickr or other third parties.

Revisions to the Privacy Policy

We may change this Privacy Policy, which pertains solely to our Wickr Pro Products, from time to time, for any reason. When we do, we will be sure to let you know one way or another by revising the date at the top of the Privacy Policy that’s available on our website and mobile application or we may provide you with additional notice (such as adding a statement to our websites’ home pages or providing you with an in-app notification). Your continued use of the Service following the posting or notice of any changed terms will denote your acceptance of such changes.

Contact Us if You Have Questions or Account-Related Requests

If you have additional questions regarding our privacy protection practices while using our Services or otherwise, please contact us via email at privacy@wickr.com.

If you live in the European Region please note the following:

Opt-out. You may contact us anytime to opt-out of: (i) direct marketing communications or (ii) the transfer of your personal data outside the European Region. Please note that your use of some of the Service may become ineffective upon opt-out.

Access. You may access the data we hold about you at any time within the application or by contacting us directly.

Amend. You can also contact us to update or correct any inaccuracies in your personal data.

Erase and forget. In certain situations, for example, when the data we hold about you is no longer relevant or is incorrect, you can request that we erase your data.

You may contact us at gdpr@wickr.com on any questions you may have about your personal data and our use of such personal data under the GDPR.

What is Wickr

Wickr Messenger is a free app that provides end-to-end encryption of text, picture, audio and video messages. Senders control who can read their messages and when they expire. Encrypted messages are stored on our servers and are deleted after they are downloaded to the recipient’s device(s). We do not have plaintext copies of messages exchanged through our system or the keys to decrypt user content. We can’t read any of the messages sent through Wickr Messenger, nor do we know who our users are, or with whom they communicate.

Wickr Pro is a separate collaboration platform that allows its customers to create secure professional networks within which to send messages and files. Senders control who can read their messages and when they expire. Encrypted messages are stored on our servers and are deleted after they are downloaded to the recipient’s device(s). We do not have plaintext copies of content exchanged through our system or the keys to decrypt user content. As Wickr business tools are designed to be used within professional environment, each customer network is managed by the customer’s administrator who can invite users within and outside of the enterprise.

Wickr is committed to operating in an environment of complete transparency and to cooperating with law enforcement while respecting each individual’s right to privacy.

Wickr responds to valid legal process issued in compliance with U.S. law. Requests for user account information from U.S. law enforcement should be directed to Wickr through proper service of process.

Service of Process

Wickr accepts service of court orders, search warrants, and subpoenas for information by email from law enforcement and government agencies, provided that these legal requests are sent from an official government email address of the requesting agent. Law enforcement and/or government agencies should submit legal requests directly from their official government email address to legal@wickr.com.

While electronic service is preferred, process may also be served by mail or courier to:

If opting for electronic service, there is no need to serve duplicate hardcopy process on Wickr to the address above.

Private Information Requires a Subpoena or Court Order

Non-public information about Wickr users’ accounts will not be released to law enforcement except in response to appropriate legal process such as a subpoena, court order, or other valid legal process.

Contents of Communications Are Not Available

Requests for the contents of communications require a valid search warrant from an agency with proper jurisdiction over Wickr. However, our response to such a request will reflect that the content is not stored on our servers or that, in very limited instances where a message has not yet been retrieved by the recipient, the content is encrypted data which is indecipherable.

What Must Be Included in Account Information Requests?

Law enforcement or government requests for user information must include:

Identifying information of the account for which information is requested, such as User ID or phone number (please note that phone numbers will only yield responsive information when the user has enabled ID Connection)

A description of information being sought

The descriptions should be as narrow and specific as possible in order to avoid misinterpretation and/or objections for overly broad requests. Wickr will construe received requests narrowly to maintain users’ privacy and ensure that any information disclosed does not exceed the scope of the request.

Further, Wickr requires law enforcement and/or government agencies to include the following information so that requests for user information may be validated:

Requesting law enforcement/government agency

Requesting agent name and badge/ID number

Valid agency e-mail address and physical return address

Phone number of requesting agent, including extension when applicable

Response due date

A copy of the court order, warrant, or subpoena

Will Wickr Notify Users of Requests for Account Information?

Wickr’s policy is to notify users of requests for their account information prior to disclosure including providing user with a copy of the request, unless we are prohibited by law from doing so or if there is danger of death or serious physical injury. As soon as legally permitted to do so, we will notify our users of requests for their information.

What Information Does Wickr Store?

Wickr has the following information about user accounts on Wickr Messenger:

Date an account was created

Type of device(s) on which such account was used

Date of last use

Total number of sent/received messages

Number of external ID’s (email addresses and phone numbers) connected to the account, but not the plaintext external IDs themselves

Avatar image (if user elected to provide one)

Limited records of recent changes to account settings such as adding or suspending a device (does not include message content or routing and delivery information)

Wickr version number

Wickr has the following information about user accounts on Wickr Pro:

Network affiliation

Wickr Pro ID (email address)

Phone number, if provided by network administrator as a second form of authentication

Date an account was created

Type of device(s) on which an account was used

Date of last use

Total number of sent/received messages

Avatar image (if user elected to provide one)

Limited records of recent changes to account settings such as adding or suspending a device (does not include message content or routing and delivery information)

Wickr has the following information about network administrator accounts on Wickr Pro:

For Wickr Pro, the configuration of each network may vary depending on the enterprise needs. Thus, the information Wickr may be able to provide in response to a lawful request for user information will vary as well.

Emergency Disclosure Requests

Wickr may provide information to law enforcement in response to a valid emergency disclosure request.

We review emergency disclosure requests on a case-by-case basis and evaluate them under applicable law (e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 2702). If we receive information that gives us a good-faith belief that there is an exigent emergency involving the danger of death or serious physical injury to a person, we may provide information to law enforcement to prevent that harm, if we have it.

Emergency disclosure requests must be on law enforcement letterhead and include all of the following information:

Identity of the person who is in danger of death or serious physical injury;

The nature of the emergency;

Wickr ID (user name) of the subject account(s) whose information is necessary to prevent the emergency;

The specific information requested and why that information is necessary to prevent the emergency;

The signature of the submitting law enforcement officer; and

Any other relevant details about the circumstances that we should take into account.

Preservation Requests

Upon receipt of a valid preservation request from law enforcement under applicable law, we will temporarily preserve the relevant account records for 90 days pending service of legal process. We will only disclose preserved records upon receipt of valid legal process.

Preservation requests should be on law enforcement letterhead, signed by the requesting official, and include a valid official email address. Preservation requests may be submitted via the methods described above.

Parties to litigation may satisfy party and non-party discovery requirements by seeking the contents of an account directly from the user.

Wickr does not preserve account content in response to a request from a private party.

Customer Records

Wickr may provide customer records in response to a valid subpoena issued by a federal or California or New York court where the requested information is indispensable to the case and not already within a party’s possession. It is Wickr’s policy to give affected account holders prior notice before complying with such subpoenas.

If opting for electronic service, there is no need to serve duplicate hardcopy process on Wickr to the address above.

Production of Records, Authentication

We provide responsive records in electronic format. We reserve the right to seek reimbursement for the costs of producing records where appropriate.

Wickr does not provide expert witness testimony. However, all substantive responses to legal process requests will be accompanied by a signed Certificate of Authenticity of Business Records, which should eliminate the need for the testimony of a custodian of records.

Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties

Wickr’s policy is to promptly respond to requests that are issued via U.S. court upon proper service of process either by way of a mutual legal assistance treaty or letter rogatory.

As a courtesy to international law enforcement agencies, we will review and respond to properly submitted preservation requests while the MLAT or letters rogatory process is underway.

Transparency Reporting on User Accounts

Wickr is committed to meeting and exceeding industry standards for transparency reporting. In this report you will discover the details of the past six months of our receipt and responses to user information requests or legal processes from January 1, 2018 until June 30, 2018. Additional information can be found in our Legal Process Guidelines.

Our Philosophy and Impact At Wickr, we hold a long-standing belief that transparency is a prerequisite to earning our users’ trust and growing our platform. And while the messages we secure will never­­­ be outwardly visible, our practices, policies and philosophies – especially as they relate to how our privacy practices – should be front and center. Our semi-annual transparency reporting practice is designed to inform users about requests for their account information.

FAQs

When Does Wickr Provide Law Enforcement with Details on its Subscriber Accounts?

Wickr cooperates with law enforcement by providing information related to its users’ accounts only when properly served with legal process or in life-or-death situations.

What Kinds of Information Does Wickr Turn Over on Those Accounts?

Wickr can provide non-content information describing an account such as: date of its creation, the date of last use, the total number of messages sent and/or received, the type of device on which the account was created. See our Legal Process Guidelines for the full list.

When Does Wickr Provide Law Enforcement with Subscriber Content?

Never! Our system is designed to protect our users’ privacy such that we never have access to our users’ decrypted message content so can’t pass it on to anyone else.

July 1, 2019 Reporting Statistics [1]

[1] Wickr is committed to sharing information about the requests it receives for its users’ account information. Above is a table detailing requests received for our users’ information from January 1, 2019-June 27, 2019.

[2] Wickr notifies users of requests for their information including providing a copy of the legal process, unless required by a non-disclosure order not to do so or when disclosure is not practicable or would not be fruitful such as when a user does not exist, a request is withdrawn, or in an emergency situation such as a missing person investigation or where there is a danger of death or serious physical injury.

[3] “Warrants” are used to obtain information which may be similar to information available to a requestor through a subpoena or court order except that requestors often seek the content of the communications through the use of a warrant. Therefore, in order to get a warrant, law enforcement must demonstrate ‘probable cause’ to a court that the requested information evidences a crime.

[4] “Orders” are signed by a judge and may include the following: Non-Disclosure Orders requiring us to keep private a request for users’ account information, 2703(d) Orders under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (the federal law that regulates law enforcements’ access to customer data and content) in both civil and criminal cases, as well as Pen Register Orders which provide for real-time disclosure of non-content data.

As of the date of this report, Wickr has not received an order to keep any secrets that are not in this transparency report as part of a national security request.

[6] “Other Requests” may include Preservation Requests, Emergency Disclosure Requests, and Civil Requests including Subpoenas. Preservation Requests are requests by law enforcement for preservation of a users’ non-content account information for up to 90 days until such time that it serves the proper legal process to receive such information. Emergency Disclosure Requests are requests from a government agency in exigent circumstances involving life or death. We review and process emergency requests upon a showing that the information provided will help save lives.

[7] “Non-U.S. Requests” include formal legal processes deriving from foreign governments. We require that any such requests conform to the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (M.L.A.T.) or letters rogatory process.

Transparency Report Archive:

Abuse Reporting

As a secure communications platform, we take safety and security of our users seriously. Wickr’s terms of service outline community guidelines and prohibited user conduct. Users cannot utilize the platform for unlawful purposes or to harm others. Wickr is committed to ensuring that our users have a positive experience communicating via Wickr in a socially responsible way.

If you encounter unlawful activities on our platform, please reach out to legal@wickr.com with as much detail as possible about the situation. Our team will carefully review and take appropriate actions to protect the Wickr community and community at large including reporting the abuse to appropriate authorities and removal actions against individual accounts.